


timeless

by bookwormtiff



Category: Persona 3, Persona 4
Genre: M/M, circling one another searching for cracks, impromptu therapy sessions, smoke from a mirror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 19:31:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20296792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookwormtiff/pseuds/bookwormtiff
Summary: They are the same, two Wild Card users wallowing in the shards of shattered illusions, scraped bloody and raw to the bone.





	timeless

**Author's Note:**

> Something small for a friend, written in 2014 and carted over here because I think I quite like it still ^^

Souji balances his obligations like a juggler with impeccable precision, catching them as they tumble and spin through the air, movements measured, assured.

Never once do they threaten to slip away.

He’s sitting at the kitchen table when he hears the news, and it’s enough for him to pause, piece of toast halfway to his mouth. A childhood friend, his uncle says, a slight frown on his face. I thought you might want to know.

_I don’t remember,_ thinks Souji. _I’ve had too many childhood friends._

His past had been a mass of them, long before he’d learned better than to set down roots and invite himself to pain. Those connections were quickly spun, and the fine threads broken when the winds blew them apart. But when he hears the name he does recall, surprisingly enough, a flicker of blue, a sense of quietude that seeps deep into his body.

That’s when the dreams begin.

It’s not the Velvet Room, but the trappings are there; darkly luscious, overwhelming somehow, as the cloth seeks to smother him in its folds. There are two chairs in the centre of the floor, where the light shines brightest like a prison cell made ready for interrogation.

And he waits for him. Still alive, as they transcend time, and instinctively Souji knows that they are the same.

The knowledge makes him pause with the shock of it - him, a Wild Card? The boy who never spoke? But the aura is unmistakable, that swelling power - multiple Personas shifting beneath the skin.

“Minato!”   
“Souji.”

They shake hands. He shivers, for Minato’s skin is smooth to the touch, and cool.

And a courtship begins, yet again. Every night Souji holds himself back and attacks as he always does, gentle but probing, always kind. Yet against his better judgement he begins to spill, to bare himself to this silent boy who always listens so attentively.

It’s so easy, he thinks with surprise, to understand what they see in him. Some quiet gravity of attraction pulls Souji towards him, to crave the spark of awareness in eyes heavy-lidded with sleep, the calming lilt of his voice as he deigns to speak, on rare occasions. Minato is as imperturbable as a rock, his presence twice as solid, and somehow, impossibly, that brings Souji to trust him.

“I can never be what they want,” he admits at last, and the layers upon layers of artifice fall away, the multitude of personas carefully crafted, polished till not a crack remained. And Minato listens, inclines his head, strokes his hand.

Sometimes he cracks, too, a tiny thawing of those deep ice eyes, and pours out a wave of confusions that are startling, coming from him. Confessions.

“I don’t care, I don’t _care_,” he says, once. “Sometimes I don’t even give any value to my life, whether I live or die, but _others_ -”

He bites off the tirade like a gate slamming down, a forced end-stop mid sentence, but his shoulders tense and he spends the rest of the session wound tight and uncomfortable. Those times, it’s up to Souji to comfort him, to tease out the knots in his body carefully with his fingers, while in that boundless empathy swells a kind of pity; he, a boy who embraces death, with the burden of the world’s despair upon him alone - a responsibility no one should have to bear.

So… fragile.

(He does appear, eventually, with chains and barbed wire chafing round his wrists, and simply says, “It’s done.”)

Intentions notwithstanding, the barriers crumble, no matter how much they had wanted to remain unscathed. Here, they come to know the other with an intimacy that is frightening, and instead of superficial sweetness they are as echoes of each other, free to speak the truth, and then to offer solace…

Like facing his Shadow, Souji thinks, yet this Shadow is not a distorted image, smoke from a mirror. Rather, a pale young man, lithe and slender with dark hair that tumbles over one eye, and he mouths words that coil in the air and sting.

They are the same, two Wild Card users wallowing in the shards of shattered illusions, scraped bloody and raw to the bone.


End file.
